Municipalities face challenges from growth that brings more people, vehicles, and events. City planners are already updating infrastructure to build more robust systems designed to incorporate features possible with new technology. For example, technology makes possible wireless remote control, and monitoring of street and roadway lights.
Video monitors can provide information on traffic patterns to a central management system. This information can be used to control traffic lights to adjust the traffic flow. Also, information on optimum routes and parking information can be uploaded to smart-enabled vehicles. Information obtained from weather sensors could prepare drainage systems for flooding. Motion detectors could interface with streetlights to deter criminals. Solar sensors could communicate with a network of smart buildings to coordinate power and energy usage. Chemical, biohazard, and ionized radiation detectors can monitor and analyze air quality.
By embedding sensors into street lights and installing these additional devices, a significant amount of data can be collected. All this data needs to be communicated across a communication network to a centralized data repository, where the data can be analyzed and utilized. This communication network can also have a need to efficiently download data and/or provide control commands to the sensor devices.
With an enormous amount of sensors collecting data, the communication network bandwidth can be seriously compromised without a robust data compression scheme.